Charles Manson's enduring notoriety

At a friend’s book launch this past summer in Venice, I met a lady who, upon hearing I had written not one but two books about Charles Manson, angrily turned on me and declared, “Why would you want to spend so much time writing about a creep like that?”

She wasn’t wrong.

Then she explained her wrath by telling me a shocking vignette that, after almost 50 years, brought Manson and his demented and drug-addled girls' fiendish handiwork sharply into focus.

In August l967, she said, she had bought and carefully wrapped a gift to take to a baby shower planned for her good friend — an actress named Sharon Tate. That baby shower never took place.

I remembered that encounter with the late actress's angry friend when I learned Manson had died at age 83 of “natural causes.” Good riddance to bad rubbish was my somewhat feeble thought.

Since that awful summer of l969, I had spent an inordinate amount of time writing, tracking and thinking about Manson and his disciples, who went on their violent rampage first on Aug. 9 in Beverly Hills, and then 24 hours later in Los Feliz. By the time it was over, seven innocent people were dead.

At that time, I was a West Coast correspondent for one of Britain’s largest-circulation newspapers, the London Daily Express, and my investigations took me first to the Spahn Movie Ranch in Topanga Canyon, where Manson and his clan lived.

There, Manson acolytes not involved in the killing recounted a story that seemed utterly beyond belief. Manson was their manipulative leader who ruled over an army of young runaways, mostly girls, by feeding them LSD and other drugs.

Manson, a frustrated musician, also blithely stole from the Beatles hymnal by claiming several songs in the Beatles l968 White Album, including “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution,” were actually secret messages to him warning of an impending black-white bloody race war in America.

I had traveled with the Beatles in l964 and got to know them, and I knew immediately that Manson’s crackpot thesis was absolute balderdash.

Six months before his trial began, I wrote “Five to Die,” my first Manson book. It read like total fiction. Then I watched Manson up close every day for nine months at his trial, which played out like a crazy circus act with Manson as the bizarre ringmaster.

One day, armed with a sharp pencil, he leaped up to stab trial Judge Charles Older. He was removed and watched the rest of the trial that day on TV in a holding cell.

Another day, he waved a front-page headline at the jury, which was sequestered during the whole trial. The headline read: “Manson Guilty, Nixon Says.” Again, he was sent to the sin bin while his cohorts screamed “mistrial.”

He hired the most obstructionist lawyer I have ever seen operate in a court of law. He shaved his hair and carved swastikas on his forehead, and so did the other defendants.

They were all convicted of the murders in l971 and sentenced to death, then commuted to life when the death penalty was temporarily abolished in California.

In the years that followed, Manson — denied parole 14 times — managed to stay in the public eye with crazy prison interviews on national TV often filled with gibberish rantings.

Now, even in death, Manson’s notoriety is likely to continue. New books are being written and look for a flood of them in 2019, the 50th anniversary of the murders.

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino, a master craftsman when it comes to screen violence, has a $100 million movie on Manson planned. The irony is that the state of California will help defray costs of the movie by giving it an $18 million tax credit.

Ivor Davis is a longtime Ventura resident and author of books on the Tate murders and the Beatles.